Literature and Writings
Gaskell had a fascination with language and was an expert on the Lancashire dialect. Extracts from his lectures on dialect were published in the Examiner, and the 1854 edition of Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, was accompanied by his notes on dialect. He also published numerous pamphlets and sermons, and wrote or translated over seventy hymns, some of which are still sung.
His poem, 'Sketches among the Poor, No. 1' (co-written with his wife in the manner of Crabbe), was published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1837, and his poetry collection Temperance Rhymes (1839) won the approval of Wordsworth. His poetry varied in form, but always employed plain language and attempted sensitive portrayals of characters drawn from the working classes. The poem 'Manchester Song' supplies two of the chapter epigraphs to Mary Barton.
Read more about this topic: William Gaskell
Famous quotes containing the words literature and, literature and/or writings:
“But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life’s true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for Socrates.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Even in my own writings I cannot always recover the meaning of my former ideas; I know not what I meant to say, and often get into a regular heat, correcting and putting a new sense into it, having lost the first and better one. I do nothing but come and go. My judgement does not always forge straight ahead; it strays and wanders.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)